mardi 25 octobre 2011

Some economics gurus here in Estonia and elsewhere are predicting that the pension system existing in European countries is doomed. As there will be less and less working age and really working people and more and more elderly, retired people, this seems to become an intolerable burden to the working people, i.e. taxpayers. Well, this is not the main problem. Let's make a thought experiment: there are no workers at all, the intelligent machines, robots make all the necessary work. Who will then pay the taxes, where does the money come from? This means the idea of work and taxation must be reconsidered. The GDP or in whatever way we measure the wealth of a nation has not diminished, there must be some ways to redistribute it without extra taxation of the wage earners and businessmen. For example the "Tobin tax" or something similar.

The real problem is not the ratio of people working and people retired but the rising cost of taking care of the elderly that is rising with the rise of average age. No easy solutions here. The aim must be to find ways to find efficient ways of keeping aged men and women healthy, to fight such deseases as Alzheimer, Parkinson's disease, etc. This is a difficult task, but not a mission impossible.

samedi 22 octobre 2011

In Libya, a barbarian chieftain was killed by other barbarians. It's quite improbable he was hit in crossfire. We can foresee other barbarians taking over. And it's hard to imagine that they will not engage in bloody internecine conflict.

vendredi 21 octobre 2011

It's sure, there is no devil. I think I have pointed to the fact that belief in the existence of an immensely intelligent and absolutely evil person leads to insurmountable paradoxes, to impossibility to believe in anything at all. But at the same time: there are enough people who have made and are making an enormous effort to take the role of the devil. And some of them have brilliantly succeeded.

jeudi 20 octobre 2011

Estonia is a
borderland country between Eastern and Central and between Northern
and Central Europe with a history of many conquests and many rulers.
In the last couple of centuries it was a part of the Russian Empire
with some autonomy. Local aristocracy was German-speaking, majority
of them were descendants of the Teutonic Knights who conquered the
Baltic provinces in the XIIIth century. German was the language of
administration, culture and education with the exception of
Estonian-language village schools. Such situation lasted until the
"russification" in the last quarter of the XIXth century
when Russian was introduced as the only official language and
language of education. The second half of this century was also the
time of the Estonian national revival movement inspired by the German
romanticism and made possible by migration of many Estonian speakers
to towns. For those people, identity became a problem that did not
exist for their fathers and forefathers who were either peasants or
urban underdog with little rights and practically no social mobility.
The simplest way for these new Estonians was to become Germans, to
become "linna-saks" as they were called ("saks"
comes from the word for Saxons as the Gaelic "sassenach").
For some, especially after the russification of schools, there were
many possibilities to find a good job or continue their education in
Russia. To stay Estonian, to create a culture with Estonian as its
language, to have Estonian literature, theatre, university education
was initially the dream of some idealists. Only thanks to the
struggle for supremacy between the local German landlords and the
Tzarist government these idealistic Estonians found some windows of
opportunity to create such a culture of their own. The rise of the
Estonian culture was made possible by the boom of the Russian economy
and culture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. When
the Russian empire fell apart as the result of the great war and the
Russian revolution, Estonia gained independance. This was the result
of strong nationalist sentiment, but also of the existence of a
strong educated middle class, and, of course, help from the Entente,
especially the British who were interested in creating a "sanitary
cordon" separating the chaotic Bolshevist Russia from the rest
of Europe.

In 1918 when Estonia
became an independent republic, it was de facto a multicultural
nation with three main languages -- Russian, German and Estonian, all
of which had an official status. Most educated people were
multilingual, and used all these languages in different contexts and
situations. In contrast to Russian and German, Estonian had been a
language of peasant, and had to be made fit for use in science and
"high culture". This "refurbishing" of the
Estonian language began already when Estonia was under Tzarist rule,
but gained momentum when Estonian became the official state language
of the newly created republic. But the two other languages preserved
much of their role and status for at least a generation. Annexation
of Estonia by the Soviets changed a lot, but not everything. I am
born in 1941, and in our family both German and Russian were still in
use to some degree. My mother read me poems in Russian when I was a
kid, and my grandmother and her friends used a lot of German words in
their speech. My generation is the first one who got all or nearly
all of their education in Estonian. This is one of the paradoxes of
Soviet life: although Russian was taught from the first of second
year in schools, and it was de facto the state language of the USSR,
the prestige and knowledge of Russian really

dropped during the
Soviet period in Estonia despite the official propaganda and measures
to stimulate its use. The Estonian language became both a symbol and
an instrument of Estonian resistance to Soviet rule. This rule shaped
the attitudes and orientations that have now, after Estonia regained
its independence, inspired our cultural and language policies. In
Estonia, Estonian is the only official language and its use is
strictly regulated and guarded even by a kind of language police
(Keeleinspektsioon) similar to the language police in Québec. This
year, a law has been passed that 60% of lessons in local Russian
schools have to be given in Estonian. In practice, this amounts to an
effort to assimilate at least a good part of local Russian-speaking
population. In any significant publishing house and periodical, the
language editors are editing texts to make them to conform to the
official standards of vocabulary and grammar. In some cases it
amounts to a kind of language censorship. At the same time, most
young Estonians are learning English, and the influence of English
and other Western languages can be felt in both written and spoken
Estonian despite the official policies. The efforts of our linguistic
purists are centered on replacing the international words with what
they consider Estonian ones, but there is little attention paid to
the more latent influences. In fact, Estonian is more and more
becoming a variant of the "Standard Average European", a
language where an Estonian word is seen more as a correspondence to
an English one than belonging to a group of semantically connected
Estonian ones. The rigid language policies have become an obstacle to
free, spontaneous speech and writing, partly obliterating the
individual or local differences of style and obfuscating the language
sense of most people. The real spoken language is living its own
life, although it is often seen as slang and shunned or even
prohibited in official use. The fact that our language teaching and
language policies are centered on correctness and purity, not
creativity and spontaneity, is, in my opinion, the main reason why
many people in Estonia have difficulties in expressing their
thoughts. I feel that under the specious cover of the Estonian
monoculture, processes are under way that can become more destructive
to the Estonian language (and consequently culture too) than the
half-century of Soviet rule.

I finish with an item
from my blog.

In his book "Linguistic
Ecology: Language Change and Linguistic Imperialism in the Pacific
Rim", Peter Mühlhäusler writes:

"The grammatical
adjustment that is encountered in most Pacific languages that have
come under the influence of expatriate missions and education systems
is that a number of apparently viable languages (in terms of numbers
of speakers and social institutionalization), such as Fijian or
Samoan, have nevertheless disappeared, in the sense that what has
remained is primarily their formal properties and what has gone is
their semantic and pragmatic aspects. The continuation of mere
lexical forms of earlier languages raises the question of identity of
linguistic systems over time, external pressure(s) having introduced
a degree of discontinuity and restructuring that renders the notion
of historical continuity useless."

Hasn't the same
happened to the Estonian language that has been and is being
intensively restructured by foreign influences, these influences
having been successfully internalized and sometimes taken to extremes
by our own literati? Has the old Estonian disappeared, being replaced
by a euro-language that has lost most of its "semantic and
pragmatic aspects"? Isn't, paradoxically, the Russian language,
at present downgraded and driven out of use a potential counterweight
to the overwhelming Euro-American influence on Estonian?

vendredi 14 octobre 2011

Reading our papers, watching our TV I have more and more the feeling that materials published or shown on Russia are not just biased, but these materials can be classified as disinformation. People -- and this is true of most of our younger generation -- who are unable or not accustomed to read Russian press or Russian websites can have the impression that Russia is a dismal corrupt dictatorship where there is no freedom of expression, where dissidents are jailed or even killed, where common people are poor, etc. One of the latest news I could read on our national broadcasting company's website was a prediction that Russia has no other way than falling into precipice.

I have little personal experience of modern Russia, but returning from St. Petersburg on coach I could see with my own eyes that the area between St. Petersburg and the Estonian border that in Soviet times was partly abandoned, where there were only destitute villages with miserable huts, is now quite similar to what we see on the Estonian side of the border: a lot of new buildings, new roads, a lot of construction work, old houses refurbished, painted, small townships looking much better and cleaner, people better clad. As to the freedom of expression, I can every day read critical articles about developments in Russia on RIAN, Lenta, NG and other websites. I read a long review of a book written by the former Guardian correspondent in Moscow on a Russian website. And there is a lot of talk about the recent events, especially the sacking of the finance minister Kudrin and Putin and Medvedev changing their roles. And regularly we can read about Khodorkovsky, his opinions are quoted and retold. We can make an experiment, taking for example the titles of articles from the semi-official website RIAN.ru and calculate which ones of them could have been published in a Soviet paper. The result is niggardly, maybe 10%-20%. This could be a measure of the situation with freedom of expression in Russia.